Australia has continued its rise as a source of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, according to new figures from Akamai that have also highlighted a likely massive threat to retailers in the leadup to the critical holiday shopping season.

The https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/resources-cloud-security-2015-q3-web-security-report.html" target="_blank">Akamai Q3 2015 State of the Internet Security Report found that Australian sources accounted for 5 percent of attack traffic on the content distribution network (CDN) operator's network – up from 4 percent in the previous quarter. This put Australia in the top 10 sources for DDoS traffic, continuing a trend that has been attributed to the growing availability of high-bandwidth connections over the National Broadband Network (NBN).

John Summers, vice president of Akamai's Cloud Security Business Unit, attributed the surge to the “easy availability of DDoS-for-hire sites that identify and abuse exposed Internet services”.

Akamai dealt with 1510 DDoS attacks during the quarter – a 180 percent jump over the same period a year ago and 23 percent up from Q2. Online gamers were the most frequently hit with DDoS attacks, while the media and entertainment industry faced the largest DDoS attacks – including an attack that hit its target with what Akamai says is a “record-breaking” 222 million packets per second.

That compared with an overall average DDoS intensity of 1.57 million packets per second. “An attack of this size could bring down a tier 1 router, such as those used by Internet service providers,” Akamai's analysis noted.

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